Sharon to meet Abbas in first summit for over four years

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, will meet Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President in Egypt next week in the first summit between the two sides in the conflict for over four years.

With the pace of Middle East diplomacy quickening in an effort to make the current fragile de facto truce a basis for a return to the peace process, Mr Sharon announced his agreement to attend the summit hosted by the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The meeting in the Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh is also expected to be attended by King Abdullah of Jordan in a move which Israeli officials said yesterday they hoped would, if confirmed, further underline Arab support for Palestinian efforts to maintain a halt to militant violence.

The meeting will follow hard on a visit by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, who will meet Mr Sharon here on Sunday and the Palestinian leadership, including Mr Abbas, on Monday.

The US embassy in Tel Aviv cast doubt on Israeli media reports that Ms Rice would also attend the summit, saying they were "way premature". But while Ms Rice is due to give an important speech in Paris on Tuesday, an official did not completely rule out the possibility.

The Egyptian presidency said yesterday that Mr Mubarak had invited the leaders to meet "in light of the delicacy of the stage the peace process in the Middle East is going through and in an endeavour to seize the auspicious opportunity to achieve tangible progress on the Palestinian track."

The last face-to-face meeting between an Israeli Prime Minister and the top Palestinian leadership was the ill-starred summit chaired by President Clinton, also at Sharm-el Sheik, between Ehud Barak in October 2000 and Yasser Arafat after the present Palestinian uprising had begun.

Although Mr Sharon met Mr Abbas in June 2003, the latter was Prime Minister and answerable to Mr Arafat whom Mr Sharon never met after taking office.

The summit was announced after a meeting here yesterday between Mr Sharon and Egypt's chief of intelligence, Omar Suleiman, who is currently also in the midst of talks with leaders of the Palestinian armed factions, including Khaled Mashaal the Damascus-based Hamas leader whom he was due to meet in Cairo last night.

The announcement of the summit is bound to intensify Palestinian hopes that Israel will agree at Sharm el-Sheikh to the central conditions demanded by the armed factions for a full ceasefire, including an end to the assassination and pursuit of wanted militants, and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has already indicated that it is prepared to halt targeted killings of militants if a ceasefire holds, and there have been signs that it might be prepared to set up a joint committee with Palestinian security officials designed to allow Palestinians to disarm specific wanted militants instead of pursuing them itself.

Some Israeli politicians expect Ms Rice on her visit here to seek to balance the strongly pro-Israel stance of the current US administration with a clear message that Israel must be ready to conform to its own obligations under the internationally agreed Road Map for peace -including a freeze on settlement growth in the occupied West Bank and the dismantling of settlement outposts.

Ms Rice told State Department officials in Washington on Monday that Israel faced "fundamental choices" about creating conditions in which a new and "contiguous" Palestinian state could emerge. Without a viable Palestinian state, she said, "there really isn't going to be a peace......."

The Israeli organisation Peace Now yesterday produced detailed figures and aerial photographs to show that settlement and outpost construction had continued unabated during 2004 and called for a full investigation-leading to prosecution of officials-- into how government funds and infrastructure assistance had been channelled into it.

According to Peace Now figures there are around 50 illegal outposts built since March 2001 which the Road Map requires to be dismantled and 3,500 housing units under construction throughout the occupied territories, many of them outside designated construction boundaries.

- THE INDEPENDENT